"See here, sir. You've got to admit that the soul of the whole thing is education. I don't mean education in the narrow sense that we know it here or in any other university. I mean the opening of eyes to real communal efficiency; the comprehension of the necessity of building instead of tearing down; the birth of the desire to climb one's self rather than to try to make stronger men descend." Bailly's eyes sparkled. "I don't say you're not right, George. You may be right." A fire blazed comfortably in front of them. The chairs were deep. Through a window the Holder tower, for all its evening lack of definition, seemed an indestructible pointer of George's thoughts. For a long time he talked earnestly. "I climbed," he ended. "So others can, and less selfishly and more usefully, if they're only told how; if they'll only really try." "You're always right, great man," Wandel drawled, "but we mustn't forget you climbed from fundamentals. That's education--the teaching of the fundamentals." "It means an equal chance for everybody," George said, "and then, by gad, we won't have the world held back by those who refuse to take their chance. We won't permit the congenitally unsound to set the pace for the healthy. We'll take care of the congenitally unsound." He turned to Bailly. "And you and your excitable socialists have got to realize that you can't make the world sane through makeshifts, or all at once, but with foresight it can be done. You've raised the devil with me ever since I was a sub-Freshman about service and the unsound and the virtue of soiled clothing. Now raise the devil with somebody else about the virtue of sound service and clean clothes. This education must start in the schools. We may be able to force it into public schools through the legislatures; but in Princeton and the other great universities it has to come from within, and that's hard; that, in a way, is up to you and other gentle sectarians like you. And your clubs have got to stand in some form--everywhere, if only as objectives of physical and intellectual content. Nothing good torn from the world! Only the evil----" He tapped Wandel's arm. "Driggs! If you want to go among the time-servers, to stand alone for the people; perhaps for people yet unborn----" "For a long time," Wandel said, "I've been looking for something I could really want to do. I rather fancy you've found it for me, George. I want to climb, too, always have--not to the heights we once talked about at your unhealthy picnic, but to the furtherest heights of all, which are guarded by selfishness, servility, sin--past which people have to be led." Squibs cried out enthusiastically. "And from which you can look down with a clear conscience on the climbers to whom you will have pointed out the path." "I see now," Lambert put in, "that that is the only way in which one with self-respect can look down on lesser men." George laughed aloud.